Sun Microsystems' Grid, a publicly available computing service, was hit by a denial-of-service network attack on its inaugural day, the company said Wednesday. To let people try out the Sun Grid, the company made a text-to-speech translation service publicly accessible for, for example, turning blog entries into podcasts. "It became the focus of a denial-of-service attack," Aisling MacRunnels, Sun's senior director of utility computing, said in an interview Wednesday.
In denial-of-service attacks, numerous computers--often groups of compromised PCs called botnets--simultaneously attack a target on the network. In this case, the attack took down the text-to-speech service. Dealing with the issue was relatively easy: Sun moved the service to be within the regular Sun Grid, which requires authorization to use. "We had to defend against a bunch. There were too many coming against us, so we moved it inside," MacRunnels said.
